5 Tips to Jump From Partial Quality Management to Total Quality Management

Canada's Conference Board conducted a series of international studies on Total Quality Management. One of these studies indicated that seventy percent of all North America companies failed to effect a "total quality strategy". Total Quality Management requires that efforts are made to improve quality and service throughout the organization. Many organizations speak of utilizing TQM, but only implement PQM (Partial Quality Management). The action must be driven from the top but initiated from the individual workers level. Everyone at every level must be involved in the process.

Renowned Notre Dame Football coach Lou Holtz once said: "Don't promise more than you can deliver, but always deliver more than you promise." In fact, the majority of corporations and other organizations fall far short of the quality and service they promise in their catch phrases, media ads, promotional events, sales pitches, shiny catalogs, and all their other flashy hype.

How can your company become more action than talk and make the jump from PQM to TQM? It's very difficult. Here are a few helpful pointers:

Involve your Senior Management! - Lip service (not even passionate) and permission are not enough. The bosses' visible priorities become the priorities of managers and supervisors. Improvement of service, and the quality of services are often relegated from top level, to middle level - who relegates it to the bottom level. Finning, Ltd in Vancouver (largest Caterpillar dealer in the world), Jim Shepard (CEO) and the executives have taken the initiative to be the first to take all of the service and quality training that all other employees receive. Not only that, they often train and teach the sessions to their employees as well.

Teams for Support and Focus - Large organizations may have work groups, departmental, branch, process improvement or progress teams at their center. Sometimes there are more teams then an organization really needs especially in their first few years. At times the new managers and old managers are at odds with each other. The old managers, meaning those who have been around for awhile, may feel threatened by new methods, processes and techniques. The newer supervisors or managers may feel as if they have reached a brick wall as their suggestions are not well tolerated.

Improved Reporting and Planning - The quality and service improvement that should be overseen with rigor and discipline, which proper business planning is all about. Supervisors with more subordinates, money and training at improving the business has little expectation. Often it ends with even less or no service or quality. A superior organization can be most effective with teamwork from management, work teams, board members or union members, with a little extra effort from the vendors or customers that will develop the quality strategy. The same effort given to financial statements should be put into quality and service ratings and the reporting system.

An indication that PQM is being implemented is the excessive reliance on a few improvement techniques and the exclusion of others. TQM on the other hand requires using a wide range of techniques, such as awareness of what constitutes excellent customer service, understanding the basic principles behind quality improvement, understanding the meaning of value and learning how to improve processes at all levels using the Xerox principle of "management based on fact". The goal is to incorporate all of these ideas and practices into the company culture.

Building Skills as well as Knowledge - You can watch hours of videos and slides, read your weight in manuals and books, listen to a lecturer who has the motivational skills of a TV evangelist, but none of that will teach you how to conduct a successful meeting or resolve conflict. When you are beginning a fitness program, you understand the ideas of common sense to be applied but how to apply them is the key to a great program. So it is with training programs for learning new technology. Watch out for programs that will leave you excited and enlightened but no more competent than when you started.

A total commitment and implementation of the Total Quality Management program is phenomenal as well as highly rewarding. To chance from PQM to Total Quality Management is not a band-aid, quick fix operation; it requires strict discipline, a change in habits and consistency. It has been compared to endlessly dieting and changing your life style. Great success requires thoughtful change.

Establishing "Total Quality Management" in the workplace is not as easy as some assume. The idea implies action as well as quantifiable improvements in quality and service. But some implementations turn out to be entirely ineffective. One study conducted by Canada's Conference Board revealed that about 70% of North American companies experimenting with TQM fail even to show a useful "total quality strategy." However, TQM is not some passing fad; many companies which could benefit have yet to give the plan a real trial. Some proponents of TQM may only be making half-hearted efforts or doing what could best be described as PQM, or "Partial Quality Management."

Daiv Russell is a management and marketing consultant with Envision Consulting in Tampa, Florida. If you like the 5 Tips for Total Quality Management Learn more about TQM at total-quality-management.info and learn to Define Kaizen

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